Skylab 3 Commander, a Patient AstronautBy Victor K. McElheny Nov. 17, 1973
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November 17, 1973, Page 22
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.Before he went aloft on his first space flight for eight or more weeks as the commander of the Skylab 3 crew, Gerald Paul Carr, a close‐cropped lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, said exuberantly, “I'm looking forward most to sticking my nose up against the wardroom window and watching earth go by.” The 41‐year‐old pilot had to be patient in waiting for this view, which sweeps by the round window of the orbiting workshop 16 times a day. Colonel Carr has been an astronaut for seven years, during which 11, of the 18 pilots selected with him as astronauts in April, 1966, have already flown in space.
Men in the NewsThere were two astronauts each from the class of 1966 on Apollos 13, 14, 15 and 16, one on Apollo 17, the last lunar flight, and one each on the first two Skylab crews, launched in May and July.
None of the three men now aboard Skylab has flown in space before. It is the first time since December, 1965, when Air Force Col. Frank Borman and Navy Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. spent two weeks aboard Gemini 7, that all members of an American astronaut crew are “rookies.”
Colonel Carr has been asked about this constantly, and a typical answer begins, “There is no substitute for experience.” He noted that the commanders of the first two Skylab flights, Capts. Charles Conrad Jr. and Alan L. Bean of the Navy had both had many problems calling for solutions on short notice.
“They thought of things that never would have occurred to others,” Colonel Carr said. “I'm sure that our lack of experience will be an embarrassment at one time or another in the mission.”
Referring to the 29 manned space flights in 12 years before the latest Skylab mission, Colonel Carr said, “We've matured to the point where we can get away with all‐rookie crews.'”
Although the brown‐haired, blue‐eyed colonel's first space flight opportunity came with Skylab, he was closely in volved with the Apollo program.
He spent much time at the Grumman Aerospace Corporation's factory at Bethpage, L. I., where the two stages of the lunar landing craft were put together in an immense “clean room” on metal stands decorated with the pictures of the astronauts who woud fly in them.
“I enjoy fiddling around with systems,” Colonel Carr said, noting that one of his hobbies is restoring an old sports car. He worked on the lunar lander that was to have flown on the Apollo 8 mission—which instead simply orbited the moon. Then, he worked on the lunar lender that Captains Conrad and Bean piloted to the moon's Ocean of Storms in November, 1969.
Role in Mission ControlLike many other astronauts, Colonel Carr worked as a “capsule communicator” in the mission control room in Houston, serving as the sole relay for all comments, requests and orders between earth and the astronauts in space.
On Apollo 8, he was at the CapCom's console when Captain Lovell, newly in orbit around the moon on the morning of Christmas Eve, began describing it for earthdwellers as “essentially gray, like plaster of paris.”
As Apollo 12 lifted from the Kennedy Space Center into a rainy sky and was struck by lightning, it was Colonel Carr who heard the word from the spaceship that “we had the whole world drop out on us,” meaning that the astronauts had encountered major, if brief, problems with their electrical systems. Colonel Carr recalled that he was a charter member of “The Royal Order of the Sweaty Palm.”
Colonel Carr was born Aug. 22, 1932, in Denver and grew up in Santa Ana, Calif., where his mother still lives and where he met his wife, the former Jo Ann Ruth Petrie. They have three sons and three daughters, including two sets of fraternal twins.
After receiving a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1954, he entered the Marine Corps, and, after flight training, served in tactical squadrons before shifting to systems testing duty in 1965–66.
NASA via United Press International
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Wątek: Gerald Paul Carr (1932-2020) (Przeczytany 1868 razy)